‘Evil’ Paramount Plus Episode 4 Recap: “E Is For Elevator”

Evil has always differentiated itself from the procedural pack not just through its demonic assessor setup, but through its cases. Rather than lazily opting for more derivative, predictable monsters of the week, the series zeroed in on how the very online, very f—ed up modern world can warp people’s morality through diabolical schemes that might just be on par with Biblical demons. In its first three episodes, Evil Season 2 somewhat did away with these more topical cases in favor of more character-driven, mythology-focused episodes (which the Kings have said was spurred by COVID filming protocols). Luckily, Episode 4 (titled “E is for Elevator”) finds a happy medium between the two.

This week, the trio are enlisted to investigate the disappearance of a teenage boy named Wyatt, whose parents have found a pentagram drawn on his bedroom floor. Since David spends much of the episode reluctantly serving as Leland’s spiritual advisor and fighting to deliver a sermon about racism in his very white parish, solving this mystery mostly rests on Kristen and Ben’s shoulders. Side note: Watching them try to explain their exorcism jobs to ordinary people without David’s help is hilarious. Kristen’s daughters quickly figure out that a strange phrase carved into Wyatt’s desk corresponds with a Japanese challenge known as the “elevator game,” in which players ride to different floors in intricately detailed succession, with the goal of ending up in the nether regions of Hell. And if you do any of the steps wrong, you’ll be haunted by all the souls who died in that building. Fun!

With Kristen’s stubborn children in tow (with the exception of the consistently singled-out Lexis, who has a tutoring session), she and Ben head over to the Upper West Side apartment building Wyatt was last seen in. But there’s a problem: The elevator game requires you to visit a building’s 13th floor, and no such floor exists here. So they’re forced to stop the game midway through, when a young woman named Caroline (Midanah Penda) conveniently shows up and ominously informs them that it really does work. Her best friend Felicia was Wyatt’s girlfriend and eventually disappeared a month after he did, leading the police to assume the two ran off together. But Felicia made sure she was on a recorded phone call with her friend while she played the game, and that audio clip culminates in Felicia letting out a blood curdling scream.

Ben digs further into the building’s history, and let’s just say the gang’s haunting prospects don’t look good. It turns out that over 300 people died there during the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic (another bit of pandemic foreshadowing?). Then in 1963, a 14-year-old girl got stuck in the elevator, trying to claw her way out for 10 minutes after her body was chopped in half. Some say the building’s residents can still hear her fingernails scraping across the halls. But hey, at least the pandemic will lower their rent soon?

Kristen and Ben’s subsequent investigations into the elevator game nail home how Evil Season 2 straddles the line between character studies and the ghoulishly fun cases. Kristen impulsively heads back to the elevator late that night after thinking she heard the girl’s nails down her hallway, popping the anti-hallucination pill her psychiatrist prescribed her but still seeing the girl’s zombified corpse after getting trapped in the elevator shaft between the 12th and 14th floors. While her PTSD or possession could explain her impulsiveness, she’s also being forced to reckon with these supernatural forces in a way she never really did in Season 1. And when Ben becomes trapped in an underground floor (or the nether regions?) with Wyatt and Felicia’s corpses after figuring out the game, he begins praying in Arabic. All the while, his she-demon lounges beside him and taunts his supposed religious skepticism before Kristen and David thankfully arrive to save him.

Speaking of David, he easily gets the most character-driven plot of the episode. During a spiritual counseling session, Leland asks him how he deals with the racism of the Catholic Church. After all, there are apparently only 250 Black priests in America, and 60% of White Catholics voted for Trump. His claims that David is a diversity hire the church is using to save face for their deep structural problems are just another tactic meant to sway David to the dark side, but there’s real truth to them that neither of them can ignore. When Father Kay says David’s homily about the sins of American racism is “controversy for controversy’s sake” and a fellow Black Catholic accuses David of going from “Father Tom” to “Father David,” he’s forced to reconsider the institutional rot of a church whose community has played a vital role in turning his life around. David’s ordination is just two months away, and the entire trio is running out of time for answers.

Abby Monteil is a New York-based writer. Her work has also appeared in The Daily Beast, Insider, Elite Daily, Thrillist, and others.

Watch Evil Season 2 Episode 4 on Paramount Plus